Modern application architectures a top driver of business success, growth

Adopting a modern application architecture is critical to business success and a significant driver of profit growth in today’s digital economy.

That is one of the findings of a new report from research firm Frost & Sullivan and software company CA Technologies. The companies surveyed 1,087 IT and business executives worldwide online in June and July 2018 as part of the research.

Organizations that embrace modern application architectures—such as application programming interfaces (APIs), microservices, and containers—in concert with modern development best practices such as DevOps and Agile, are better able to continuously and quickly adapt and adjust software applications to changing market trends and customer needs. This, in turn, can positively impact their bottom line, the study said.

A technician works near rack servers in the server room of the Sberbank PJSC data processing center (DPC) at the Skolkovo Innovation Center, in Moscow, Russia, on Tuesday, Dec. 26, 2017. Sberbank PJSC, Russias most valuable company, will boost its dividend payout to 50 percent of profit or higher, just not as quickly as some investors had hoped. Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloombergg

Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg

Executives said three out of the four top challenges faced by their organizations are directly related to digital initiatives, and 84 percent said modernizing the way software and applications are developed and delivered is very important or crucial to the future success of their organization.

A majority of the respondents (80 percent) feel that software provides critical support in helping them achieve key performance indicators (KPIs). Organizations participating in the study that were further along in their adoption of modern application architectures and development practices saw impressive benefits.

For example, they are eight times more likely to declare that applications are very good at supporting the achievement of KPIs than those who were relatively low in their adoption of modern application architectures; seven times more likely to say their applications are completely integrated when it comes to functionality, data sharing, authentication and security; and six times more likely to say their applications are significantly better at delivering business insights than their competitors.

However, because these organizations are heavily reliant on business-critical applications, more than half of respondents (56 percent) said software issues can negatively affect the achievement of KPIs. In fact, for 69 percent of all respondents, the pressure to release new applications or updates negatively affects quality and security. And 67 percent felt that their organization sometimes trades off security for speed.